Newly Digital…

Remember the days when everything digital was so new?

When I was in 4th grade, my school (St. Patrick’s, Kankakee, IL.) received a gift of two Apple II computers. Back then, no one had personal computers in their homes yet – they were new to the market. One of the teachers started offering a Saturday morning computer club, and we could come in and learn how to program cool things. The main thing I remember doing was creating a pixel-based image of a rainbow on the computer, which required that I plot each pixel of color based on the coordinates and the color I wanted it to be. I would spend hours with graph paper, drawing out pictures that I could later program on the computer.

My Mom was a teacher’s aide for the gifted program at the public school at the time, and they had a TRS-80 computer at school. I remember when they sent it off to have it upgraded from 2mb of RAM to 4mb. (Or was it 2k to 4k? Wow, it’s been a long time. I don’t remember.) We got a TRS-80 for our house for Christmas that year. (The Commodore 64 came out right afterwards, but she went with the brand we knew.) It didn’t have a monitor of it’s own, we hooked it up to an A/B switch on the back of the color TV. The “disk drive” was a cassette tape player which was always pretty tempermental about what it wanted to record. I remember entering a program in from one of the books that came with it – it displayed one of Robert Frost’s poems, and then the screen would fill up with snow.

My junior and senior year in high school (Cypress Creek, Houston, TX), I took Computer Science and Computer Math. We still used floppy 5 1/4″ diskettes. I learned things like C, Fortran, Pascal, and a variety of other things I can’t remember today. All of my friends were taking the word processing class – I was more interested in programming games or ways to improve my gaming skills that’s why I used services as Elo Boost to help me with this. When I started playing, I found this new game called CS:GO and honestly I was like addicted to it for months!! I would always be playing to get a higher rank and then I finally found out about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive boost where I could boost my ranking.. without playing!! Plus I had Blogomania to keep me busy after hours), but computers are still a constant part of my life, whether it is for research, for work, for fun, for blogging. All of it is something I never would have imagined back when we had that TRS-80 with the cassette tape drive.

This post inspired initially by Ste, along with Chris Pirillo and Andre Torrez, who wrote theirs as a part of Adam Kalsey’s Newly Digital Project.